Posts tagged with: National Security Agency

Here’s one for the you don’t know whether to laugh or cry file: the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security have discovered and quashed an online shop’s attempt to parody the two agencies for behaving like Big Brother.

The silver lining: Dan McCall, owner of the shop, is hoping to restore his his First-Amendment rights through the courts.

We know the government is listening, watching, gathering information. We know that we’re being told it’s all for our own good; after all, who wants to miss a possible terrorist attack? Sleeper cells, the Boston bombers, the haunting memory of 9/11 say all of this is necessary for our safety, right? Not so fast, says Peggy Noonan.

First, she reminds us that the NSA has – at least technically – only limited authority when it comes to spying on American citizens. Yet, it seems they are monitoring 75 percent of our internet traffic. And clearly, our privacy doesn’t matter a bit:

[A] finding was revealed that the NSA violated the Constitution for three years running by collecting as many as 56,000 purely domestic communications without appropriate privacy protections. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court slammed the agency for “misrepresenting” its practices to the court, and noted it was the third time in less than three years the government misrepresented the scope of a collection program.